


dépaysement

by tin_girl



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: ...kind of, ALL THE ANGST, Alcohol, Angst, Canon Disabled Character, Character Study, Descent into Madness, Hopeful Ending, Isolation, M/M, Maybe - Freeform, Open Ending, Rats, So much angst, Sorry Not Sorry, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Very bleak, actually just one maybe rat, definitely, kind of, might have been brough on by The Plague recollections because the author likes cliches, very unhealthy, wrote during the quarantine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:34:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23301736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: They told him he’d have to work hard for his bones to regrow right, and he laughed, said, what if I want them to regrow wrong?
Relationships: Heiwajima Shizuo/Orihara Izaya
Comments: 24
Kudos: 96





	dépaysement

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I spontaneously wrote this today pretty much just for one reason. Warning, corona talk incoming. Basically, I know that there are people who read all my Shizaya fanfics for some unfathomable reason (God bless you all <333) and I wanted to ask if everyone's okay? Also people who haven't read anything of mine. Just, hope you're all okay, and that's it, that's the reason. 
> 
> (Sorry, I know everyone's talking about the virus and that some people might not want to be reminded of it, but I've decided that it's better to write this here, anyway).
> 
> Also, this was somewhat inspired by the qurantine thing but please, if what's going on right now and being stuck at home is making you feel down, maybe skip this one and read some fluffy fanfic about cats. I have been reading those myself and it's kind of saving my life. This thing definitely wouldn't, it's pretty depressing and about being stuck at home and, well, rats. Not that someone dies or anything like that but it ain't a happy one. I'm probably exagerrating, making it sound like some horror, but I just really don't want to make anyone feel shitty :,) 
> 
> Anyway, if anyone does end up reading this, enjoy...? 
> 
> (I think I've used up all my fluff tolerance for this ship, tbh)

say the marrow forgave its captor, bone —

& even that is its own form of shelter;

say a bruise is just a rebellion of blood,

a rupture of capillaries & all the ghosts they

failed to contain & is that not the body

in its primal beauty? what of the self

can evolve without breakage

______of touch?

— George Abraham, _portrait of reality, in fragments_

****

By the time Izaya finds the rat, he’s been unchanged for months.

Of course, first, he only finds the hole. Something at the back of the cupboard under the sink, water dripping lazy and rare like someone trying not to blink and blinking all the same.

It hurts, kneeling there and watching the black, but Izaya finds pain entertaining, loves it, even, has, ever since—

He’s been fond of it, ever since.

No, he can’t walk. He crawls instead. The polished floorboards are good for that, no splinters. He can stand up, if he leans on something, only he won’t stand up, won’t lean on anything.

“Hello?” he says into the hole, and sighs at himself, at how it wasn’t supposed to be question.

He leaves the hole be when nothing answers, even though it seems to stare back at him, fist-sized, and when Izaya dreams, it’s always, _always_ fists.

Come back, he thinks sometimes, chewing on the pillowcase to keep from whining in pain, as if he’s ever had anything long enough to have it leave.

*

Shinra sends him a postcard, of all things. H’s not supposed to know where Izaya lives now, only Izaya hasn’t cared to cover his tracks all that much, wanted to see if anyone would bother.

He thinks that if he’d tried even a bit harder, Shinra wouldn’t, but now he’ll never know.

The postcard is from Hokkaido, and it says ‘get better’ on the back, Shinra’s illegible handwriting easy to decipher after years and years of not-friendship.

If Izaya planned on replying – only one’s not expected to, with postcards, yes? – he’d say, I’m not getting better, but I’m _getting_.

They told him he’d have to work hard for his bones to regrow right, and he laughed, said, what if I want them to regrow wrong?

It took him weeks of refusing to think about it to realize that he must have wanted to keep that strange, mangled shape Shizuo beat him into, wanted to keep the yield of his body like memory tangible enough to constitute proof, touch suspended forever like something caught in amber.

All his philosophies of evolution crumbling like card houses in light of how he didn’t want to change out of all that hurt, would keep it if he couldn’t keep anything else.

“You’re a real piece of work,” Namie told him when she brought groceries over once. It took her three months to come, and she complained while shoving vegetables inside his fridge, figure you’d starve without me. He didn’t point out that he’d kept himself alive until then, somehow, so stunned by her visit that the weary ache inside his bones seemed to sing like a note held too long.

She never came again after that, couldn’t stand to look at him. He knew that much – he kept some of his old smart.

“I wouldn’t care if you died,” she told him on her way out, curry left cooling on the stove, and Izaya didn’t move from his starfish-sprawl on the floor, listened to how even her voice was, believed her.

Later, he puked the curry out and into his toilet, forehead leaning on the seat. It wasn’t a metaphor, or anything of that sort, but just another of the many ways Shizuo had squeezed him that bit too hard.

*

He’s been inspecting the hole for an hour or so when he hears the scratching for the first time.

“Ah,” he says, and nothing replies, but the scratching continues. He puts his leftovers there, in a ramekin, and figures that after a week of amusing himself like that, he’ll add poison to the food. He closes the cupboard and sits with his back to it, eyes closed, listening to the rat gnawing on the meat, or maybe he’s only imagining it.

He smiles, anyhow.

*

Shizuo doesn’t ever come to finish him off, and Izaya still hates him for that, if nothing else.

*

He names the rat Nero, and prepares a separate portion for it, still warm, instead of giving it leftovers. He never sees more than a pair of eyes blinking in the dark, which makes it bearable, how he doesn’t have to look at all the parts of it that must be warm.

*

His sisters don’t call, which is for the best. Izaya sends them a set of knives for their birthday, and it gets sent back, _address not found._

He posts it again, and they must get it this time, because he never sees the package again.

*

Nero learns to be picky, leaves pieces of vegetables gone cold untouched. He likes meat, and carrot, and, to be honest, Izaya’s not sure if it’s even a rat, but it’s a something alive, which is enough.

He doesn’t go out, doesn’t send anyone – but who? – on errands, doesn’t order food online. Where’s Namie when you need her, huh?, he says to Nero, prying a can of peas open with a steak knife. When he makes himself bleed, a long cut on the inside of his palm, he stares at the red, transfixed, and then shoves his hand inside the cupboard and waits.

He expects teeth, but there’s nothing, his blood warm and up for the taking, but no volunteers.

“Picky,” he repeats, and laughs when he hears a scratching sound.

He’s a stupid animal himself, really, thinking that whenever he bleeds something will care to taste it or get its fingers on it, that any bit of him could stave off hunger or even bring it on just by its red and its stink.

Shizuo, he tells Nero, wouldn’t ignore a wound like that.

Only he would, has been for months, because what is Izaya if not one big, walking—

_crawling_

When he offers Nero the peas, he can hear the rat eat some, even though it prefers carrots, and he laughs and laughs until his ribs hurt, only they always hurt, so what does it matter, it doesn’t, ah.

*

Namie doesn’t visit, which is fine. Izaya knows how loyal she is, how when she says she wouldn’t care if he died, she means it, but will come to his funeral, anyway, will swap her green sweater for black and will lick her fingers clean of chicken grease after the wake.

His sisters don’t come either, which is _perfect_. He only needs Nero, anyway.

*

After two days of nothing but the specific kind of creaks that pipes make, Izaya doesn’t bother saying hello, just shoves his hand into the hole and feels for a small body gone cold.

He finds it, too, the back of his hand bumping into fur, and he feels what’s left of his muscles giving up around his bones, sagging like a sigh.

“Oh, Nero,” he breathes, hitting his forehead on the cupboard, hard, time after time. “Just when I decided to keep you. I didn’t even try to poison you, you _stupid_ —”

He can’t bear to burn the body, because fire is for laughing and not for— not for the other thing, so he just leaves the body there, inside the hole, tries to forget.

It doesn’t work.

“Should’ve eaten some of my blood,” he tells the silence, drunk on old sake, stretched on the floor like roadkill. “It would have made you strong, or maybe just fucked up, like me, but you’d live, anyhow.”

Only then does it occur to him that he did try to feed the rat poison, only the rat was smart enough not to take it, died anyway.

“Someone could write a poem about it,” Izaya says, a mangled, Picasso smile, “but no one will.”

*

I think you were good for him, in a way.

A text message, and Izaya laughs at how it only took fourteen fractured bones for Celty to change her mind about him.

It’s not true, of course, even if back in Ikebukuro—

Back in Ikebukuro, what? He remembers that blond woman, how, if Shizuo got his shit together, he could have a son that wouldn’t have to bleach his hair.

Once, in high school, Izaya was sitting on the ledge of an open window, Shizuo about to shove him off it and to his death, Izaya’s shirt fisted in his hand, the only thing keeping him upright, only something went wrong. Concrete two stories below, and Shizuo touched him with frantic fingers instead of pushing him away, handled him like Izaya was a messy room he was searching for something urgently needed. He kissed him, too, sort of – a decided but dry press of lips to skin, all over his face but not on the mouth, down his neck but not over his pulse. Later, he threw Izaya aside like a dirty sock, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, twice, left the skin there reddened.

Izaya thought, I only want you because I can’t have you, and it would take him years to realize that he would still want Shizuo, even if he could have him.

It never happened again, and every time Shizuo chased him, after, Izaya toyed with the idea of letting him catch up just to see what he would do, almost let himself lose a few times, didn’t expect Shizuo to grow fed up with the game and swipe all the pieces off the board, Izaya’s bones breaking like it was prewritten, like Izaya should have seen it coming, like someone, somewhere, watching, must have said, _ah._

He’d never quite forgotten the feeling that came from being touched once, and then never being touched again, so it seemed almost sweet to have Shizuo’s hands on him again all those years later, even as he wailed in pain.

*

The body doesn’t smell just yet, and Izaya pretends that the rat is asleep.

“Nero, look,” he says, pointing to the window, even though the cupboard door is closed. “Snow.”

Once, a drunk woman in a bar told him something her grandmother apparently used to say, how every snowfall is God getting tired of how ugly the world had gotten and wanting to cover the blemishes. Izaya remembers laughing and telling the woman that he didn’t understand gods like that, that he would relish all his bruises and the blood under his fingernails, thank you very much.

A stupid kid, thinking cities were pets and monsters were toys.

*

If you came back, I think he wouldn’t kill you.

Celty, again.

Izaya laughs and shoves his hand into the hole to show Nero the text, so it can laugh, too.

The body does smell a bit by now, but it’s all good. Izaya does, too, what with how he hasn’t moved an inch in three days, and has been sweating his way through nightmares of cities rolling up around him and tightening like a fist, the skin of them rough like when Shizuo touched him all those years before, fingertips like something that longed to hurt but wouldn’t, no matter how hard the wrists tried.

He takes a swing from one of the sake bottles and curls on his side like an embryo, wondering if death is something you can will into being, if, when you’re lonely enough for it, it will take pity on you and come.

*

Whoever’s on the other side of the door knocks three times in one-minute intervals before kicking it open. Izaya can hear the lock snap like a bone, and knows it must be Shizuo, because no one else breaks things as clean as that.

“You stink,” Shizuo says when he finds Izaya still curled up on the floor. Izaya covers his eyes with his forearm, and doesn’t cry. “I brought groceries.”

“Did you have some sort of epiphany?” Izaya asks, watching Shizuo step over his legs as if they’re logs of wood, which they are. “It’s been what, half a year?”

Shizuo watches him, sunglasses sliding low on his nose.

“It’s been _years_.”

“Oh?” Izaya says, almost interested. Mostly, he wants Shizuo to shut up, so that he can hear scratching, in case there’s any scratching to be heard.

“Peace doesn’t do me well,” Shizuo explains, almost sheepish. “Apparently.”

Izaya stares at him, shadows under his eyes, barely any meat on his bones, and he feels it waking inside him, slow like a bruise, how he wanted things, once, and many things, too, so many that he couldn't hold them all at once without having something drop.

“You’ll leave, after,” he says, more quiet than he’d like, a childish complaint.

“I’ll be back, like a yoyo.”

Izaya sighs, wants to tell him that things don’t come back to life, that life is once and not forever, that one can’t have everything in circles.

He won’t.

“Fine, whatever.”

When Shizuo touches him, he doesn’t. Instead, his hands hover, so that Izaya has to arch for his skin to meet those fingers he’s missed so—

He figures Shizuo’s trying to get him to try and push into that shape he used to be, before the broken bones, and thinks that if Shizuo yoyos back enough times, Izaya just might wake up half-right one day.

“I was scared to touch you, after that one time,” Shizuo confesses later, on his way out, the dead rat in a plastic bag hooked on his arm.

“And?”

“Not touching you was scarier.”

Izaya believes him, but never has that hole under the sink fixed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Feedback very welcome, and please do let me know if you're okay if you decide to leave a comment <3 
> 
> Also, my chaotic tumblr is 'yoyointhegarden'. /Also/ I will start publishing an original story of mine online soon-ish and will definitely link it under all my fanfics once I put up the first chapter..... which might not be on okay thing to do? I don't know the decorum, but it will only be a sentence or two of spam, so maybe it's alright. Anyway, it'd be great if even one person read it since I've been living that story for like 5 years now. So that will appear at some point, if you're interested. And another Shizaya, too, eventually, hopefully longer than this one and with no rats in it. Yeah, that's it, take care everyone and I will stop being socially awkward (which shouldn't be a thing online, anyway, what the hell) and quit talking...
> 
> Well, here's the link to the original story at last: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23463895/chapters/56249917


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